The use of electronic data and other information has become an integral part of daily life. Each day, more and more emails, electronic documents, personal information and other forms of electronic data are transmitted throughout the world by businesses and individuals alike. Accordingly, the need to secure such data from unauthorized use and viewing has also increased
Cryptography is the art and science of preparing, transmitting and reading messages in a form intended to prevent the message from being read by those not privy to secrets associated with the form. Cryptography is practiced in and widely appreciated for a wide array of applications, including gaming, computer security, healthcare information security, banking information security, military communications, mathematics, intellectual property protection and many others.
Public key cryptography provides the benefit of using a pair of related keys, including a private key that is typically a closely held secret, and a corresponding public key which may be widely revealed.
Public key digital signature schemes include methods for signing and verifying digital signatures. The signing method creates a data string called a “signature” that is associated with a digital message to bind the message to the signing entity's private key. The private key is associated with a corresponding public key, which the recipient of the message uses with a verification method to verify that the received message was, in fact, signed using the associated private key.
A public key encryption scheme includes methods for encrypting and decrypting plaintext into messages, in which a message encrypted with a party's public key can only be decrypted using the associated private key.
In the past, such prior art cryptography techniques encrypted data to make the data difficult, if not impossible, to decrypt. Such techniques were designed to prevent unauthorized review and/or use of the data by third parties. While such prior art cryptography techniques can, in fact, be very difficult to attack and bypass, such techniques remain vulnerable to attacks for several reasons.
Many prior art cryptography techniques use only a single data block or segment length when encrypting the data. Accordingly, a discernible pattern can be detected and such patterns aid in attacking and bypassing the benefits associated with using such cryptographic techniques. Still further, many prior art cryptography techniques use only a single key to encode all of the data. Accordingly, the use of a single key applied to all blocks or segments of data similarly provides the basis for finding a pattern that can be used to attack such cryptographic techniques.
Accordingly, there has been a long felt need for a new, improved and more robust cryptographic technique that can defeat well-known attacks on cryptographic methodologies. The currently disclosed technology readily satisfies this and other needs.